This week, Juniper is holding its "NXTWORK 2015" customer summit in Silicon Valley. At the event, Juniper made a number of data center announcements. These announcements come about a month after Juniper rolled out its "Unite" architecture aimed at the enterprise campus (disclosure: Juniper Networks is a client of ZK Research). While the two announcements are aimed at different parts of the network, there is a common focal point, and that's helping businesses build networks that are cloud-ready. The Unite architecture was focused on simplification, whereas Juniper's play in the data center is more about customer choice and automation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
2016 will be a year of action for companies. It will be the year that the companies that thrive will be those advancing down the customer obsession path — while those that downplay their customers’ needs will start to wither away.The good news? You and your technology teams have a critical role in helping — and in some cases, leading — your organization in adapting and thriving in the age of the customer.Here are the top trends Forrester sees shaping your business in 2016, and what you can do to advance them.1. Personalization is the new bar.
What it means: The level and quality of contextual, personalized experiences will be a key determinant of who wins mindshare and share of wallet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
HP is splitting up while Dell and EMC are coming together. Which move will pan out better?+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: HP is now two companies: How did we get here? +The two companies are taking dramatically different paths to set themselves up to compete in the fast-moving technology landscape of today.HP is dividing itself into two businesses starting today; HP Inc. will sell PCs and printers while Hewlett Packard Enterprise will focus on infrastructure sales. Dell, meanwhile, has engineered a $67 billion buyout of EMC, and by extension VMware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.FullContactPricing: FullContact is free to download and use. FullContact Premium is available by subscription — two subscription options: FullContact Premium monthly for $9.99; FullContact Premium annually for $99.99To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Network professionals continue to be among the toughest IT talent to find and hire – a situation that will drive up salaries in the coming year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Robots have arrivedFrom C-3PO to the Terminator to Star Trek’s Data, robots have entertained us on the big screen for years. But, unlike our cinematic cyborg heroes, the real thing has been something of a disappointment because the technology has failed to live up to the Hollywood hype. But this is not true anymore. Robots have arrived. Here are examples of robots being deployed in the real world. (Read the full story.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
From C-3PO to the Terminator to Star Trek’s Data, robots have entertained us on the big screen for years. But, unlike our cinematic cyborg heroes, the real thing has been something of a disappointment because the technology has failed to live up to the Hollywood hype. But this is not true anymore. Robots have arrived.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Your users are complaining: some system is down or slow. You need to determine if the problem is under your control or if the fault lies with a third party, such as your ISP or a SaaS provider. The time it takes to figure that out is your MTTI: "Mean Time to Innocence."At the recent O'Reilly Velocity show in New York City, my colleague, Phil Stanhope, talked about this topic. He pointed out a few important reasons why determining MTTI is so much more complex now than it was 10+ years ago. The Internet is increasingly complex and routinely experiences outages, instabilities, and attacks. While cloud providers, CDNs, and acceleration services may claim to be "always up," that doesn't mean that they're "always reachable." In fact, they are almost certainly experiencing a constant rate of low-level failure that is largely outside IT's control and is still affecting users. Therefore, getting to MTTI is harder than ever.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
O PioneersImage by Baker County Tourism/FlickrWe think of IT as an essential corporate function today, driven by desire for profits. But computers largely emerged out of government- and university-funded research, much of it initially driven in the 1940s by the effort to win World War II -- in Britain, to break Nazi codes, and in the U.S., to produce artillery firing tables.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
German data protection authorities' decision to break ranks with their counterparts in other European Union countries and block alternatives to Safe Harbor has business lobbyists worried.The striking down of the Safe Harbor data sharing agreement by the European Union's highest court on Oct. 6 left a legal vacuum that European Commission officials immediately sought to fill with a reminder of the legal alternatives available and promises of coordinated action by national privacy regulators, who responded with their own reassurances on Oct. 16.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Money talksImage by WikimediaIn a review of the Presidential candidates’ latest campaign finance reports, which list employee donations by company, we found seven tech companies that were common across most of the five candidates examined. Here’s a look at how much employees have contributed since the campaigns of Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson began.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It will be many months before presidential candidates face their respective conventions, but for the time being the Democrats are winning the wallets of technology workers.
Finance reform bars corporations from directly funding campaigns, but that doesn’t stop individuals from backing candidates of their choice. And according to Network World’s analysis of candidates’ most recent filings to the Federal Elections Commission, those technology workers donated far more to Democratic presidential candidates than did their Republican counterparts since the inception of each candidate’s campaign. The two frontrunning Democrats outpaced the three Republicans examined: $393,444 to $36,588. Network World reviewed the campaign finance reports of the two candidates from each party who are currently leading the polls and also included former HP chief Carly Fiorina.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Happy 30thThe MIT Media Lab will celebrate its 30th anniversary on Oct. 30 with an invitation-only symposium hosted by Penn & Teller, a choice which seems more than fitting given how much of the center’s work over the years has appeared magical before being woven into our everyday lives. What follows is a representative sample of the lab’s better known accomplishments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.DeceptionGrid version 5Key features: DeceptionGrid version 5 brings expanded forensic and analytics capabilities to reduce the time-to-breach detection of attackers that have penetrated a network. New real-time automation provides a broad view of an attacker’s activities with detailed event forensics, allowing the entire attacker Kill Chain to be analyzed and presented in a timeline that provides a visual overlay of the attack. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This month, radio electronics publication IEEE Spectrum is commemorating the 10th anniversary of its ground-breaking 2005 article, "Why software fails."
The now-archived article studied some troubled, large-scale IT projects. IEEE said they were preventable failures and explained why.
Along with the celebration, the publication has just brought out an updated database of IT debacles. This bunch covers the last 10 years. It makes for fascinating reading.
Financial waste, endless delays correcting things, and the vast numbers of people affected contribute to the horrific, gory screw-ups.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While HP’s announcement that it will shutter its Helion Public Cloud early next year didn’t surprise those who watch the market closely, the move does raise questions about what’s next for HP and other cloud vendors.HP plans to focus on two major areas: Bringing efficiencies to customers’ on-premises environments, and arming its partners with HP hardware and software to build out hosted clouds.Analysts say HP is the latest example of a legacy IT vendor that has had to adjust its cloud ambitions in light of how dominant Infrastructure-as-a-Service players Amazon Web Services and Microsoft have become. The consolation prize is that there’s still plenty of opportunity left in the private, managed and hybrid cloud markets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Innovation is the cornerstone of a successful business, so why is it so elusive to many companies? To determine the biggest roadblocks, consulting firm Imaginatik conducted a study of 200 professionals in its "State of Global Innovation" report. 35 percent of those surveyed were senior management, board members or C-Suite executives, and 76 percent of respondent's organizations had 1,000 employees or more. The results offer insight into what makes innovation stall at large companies.There's little doubt that business leaders see the value of innovation -- 95 percent of respondents say it's important enough to be a priority for C-level executives. However, while nearly every professional agreed that innovation was key, 44 percent reported that their business invested less than 2 percent of its annual operating budgets in innovation and 63 percent said their company didn't have a formal innovation-management structure in place.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Buyers of Dell and Hewlett-Packard PCs may have paid over the odds for their optical drives as a result of a cartel arrangement between eight component manufacturers.The European Commission fined the eight cartel members a total of €116 million (US$132 million) for colluding between 2004 and 2008 to fix the prices of bids to supply optical drives to Dell and HP.Philips, Lite-On and their joint venture Philips & Lite-On Digital Solutions got away scot-free for their role in revealing the cartel. Had they not turned in their co-conspirators, they would have had to pay fines totalling €64 million between them.But the other five member, Hitachi-LG Digital Storage, Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology, Sony, Sony OptiArc and Quanta Storage, must together pay €116 million, with Hitachi-LG and Toshiba Samsung paying the largest shares.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Docker containers have spread like wildfire across the technology industry, and now one of the biggest companies behind the movement has taken a big step toward making it easier to manage application containers across various infrastructure environments.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Amazon’s case for running containers in its cloud | 12 Hot application container startup companies to watch +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell CEO and Chairman Michael Dell is a few pen strokes away from buying a house in the city of Boston, Fortune reports, which may help assuage concerns here in Massachusetts that his company’s recent $67 billion purchase of EMC will result in the storage powerhouse and its some 9,500 local employees moving to Texas.Dell from the moment the deal was announced has said he plans to keep EMC right where it is, but nothing says “We’re sticking around” quite like ponying up for a local abode (Dell has other homes in Texas and Hawaii). And, local jobs aside, I have an even more parochial concern about Dell’s intentions: I live and pay taxes in the town of Hopkinton, which is the longtime home of EMC. There must be a second-largest employer/taxpayer, but I couldn’t tell you who that might be.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here